ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. one element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...

Using a new approach to force an ice sheet model, we performed an ensemble of simulations of the Greenland Ice Sheet evolution during the last two glacial cycles, with emphasis on the Eemian Interglacial. This ensemble was generated by perturbing four key parameters in the coupled regional climate-ice sheet model and by introducing additional uncertainty in the prescribed “background” climate c...

This chapter uses dental morphology to make inferences about how the New World was first colonized. The major emphasis is on the initial Macro-Indian migration based on dental traits observed in Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and more recent prehistoric crania. The major results are as follows: (1) Arctic and Subarctic native dentitions differ enough from those of Macro-Indians to indicate separate mig...

Global mean sea level has been steadily rising over the last century, is projected to increase by the end of this century, and will continue to rise beyond the year 2100 unless the current global mean temperature trend is reversed. Inertia in the climate and global carbon system, however, causes the global mean temperature to decline slowly even after greenhouse gas emissions have ceased, raisi...

Bursts in species diversification are well documented among animals and plants, yet few studies have assessed recent adaptive radiations of eukaryotic microbes. Consequently, we examined the radiation of the most ecologically dominant group of endosymbiotic dinoflagellates found in reef-building corals, Symbiodinium Clade C, using nuclear ribosomal (ITS2), chloroplast (psbA(ncr)), and multilocu...

Integration of DNA derived from ancient phototrophs with their characteristic lipid biomarkers has been successfully employed to reconstruct paleoenvironmental conditions. However, it is poorly known that whether the DNA and lipids of microbial functional aerobes (such as ammonia-oxidizing archaea: AOA) can be used for reconstructing past environmental conditions. Here we identify and quantify ...